Sociopaths/psychopaths commit a disproportionate amount of both violent and non-violent crime in all Western countries. Today is July 4th or American Independence Day, so I am going to take this opportunity to ask that friends and family members of sociopaths stop enabling them.

According to Webster’s Online Dictionary the word enable means:
1 a: to provide with the means or opportunity
b: to make possible, practical, or easy
c: to cause to operate

In her book A Dance With the Devil, (which I highly recommend) Barbara Bentley gives many poignant examples of enabling as she describes how her psychopathic husband accomplished his antisocial goals.

The most shocking of many examples is found on page 271 where she describes how her former husband was paroled after serving only 22 months in jail for trying to murder her:

Last year Lovefraud heard from a woman who said her ex-boyfriend had knowingly exposed her to the HIV virus, which causes AIDS. Before she would have unprotected sex with him, she insisted that he get a full screening for sexually transmitted diseases. The guy said he did, and everything was negative.

Nearly two years later, she found out the guy was cheating on her. She also found out he was HIV positive.

Last week, our reader has filed a lawsuit against the guy, and sent Lovefraud a link to a story about the case in the New York Post. For the frightening details, read:

Suit: Ex kept HIV secret

Today after 4 days of deliberation a jury found Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter (a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller) guilty of parental kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon. The jury foreman read a statement saying that this was a complicated case and that they “considered ALL the testimony” including that provided by a psychiatrist and psychologist who testified that Gerhartsreiter/Rockefeller was “insane” at the time of the kidnapping and assault. The jury apparently found the Harvard Psychiatrist, Charles Chu to be more credible than the defense experts. The judge, after making a statement sentenced Gerhartsreiter/Rockefeller to 5 years in prison.

I was happy the jury considered ALL the evidence and came to a just verdict. I followed this case in order to observe the way jurors, lawyers, judges and news commentators think about psychopathy/sociopathy, con artists and the issue of insanity. As some of you may know, before the name “psychopathy” was invented this condition was known as “moral insanity.” This case also raises the question of what to do when one of the child’s parents is a psychopathic con artist.

The back cover of Whores of the Court: The fraud of psychiatric testimony and the rape of American Justice by Margaret Hagen, Ph.D. has a picture of a graphic that says, “Expert Psychological Opinions For Sale.” In her book, Hagen is justifiably critical of psychologists and psychiatrists who function as “hired guns” in the court room. These hired guns, in collaboration with unethical attorneys often do the dirty work of psychopaths and make it difficult for victims to get justice.

Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have issued strong statements about the ethics of acting as a “hired gun.” Such conduct is not considered ethical.

One of Lovefraud’s con artist poster boys, James Brian Ellington, was arrested in New York City on May 15, 2009 at nearly 1 a.m. for trespass, forced entry and assault. According to the New York Post, where the case was cited in yesterday’s police blotter, Ellington “was arrested for assaulting a female friend when she demanded that he leave her Upper East Side apartment.”

Lovefraud was advised of the arrest by a reader that afternoon, who said Ellington “is scheduled to be arraigned tonight, and due to his criminal past, is unlikely to make bail. Furthermore, he has no money for bail and no one left to lend it to him, having even called the woman he assaulted from the courthouse to beg for her help.”

Kari Ferrell, age 22, was somewhat of an Internet phenomenon over the past few months, even before a New York Observer profile dubbed her the “Hipster Grifter.”

I don’t even know what word twenty-somethings use for “cool” these days, but Kari Ferrell certainly looks the part. She’s a petite woman of Korean heritage, with short, jet black hair and a big, elaborate tattoo of a phoenix on her chest. Recently arrived in New York City, she got a job at Vice Magazine—a very famous publication I never heard of that covers contemporary youth culture.

Apparently, Ferrell made friends easily and then convinced them that her ATM card didn’t work, she was pregnant, she was dying of lung cancer, etc. She also had a habit of being sexually aggressive. Within a half-hour of meeting one of her new, male co-workers at Vice, she was asking about his sexual history.

You would think parole boards would know better. After all, they deal with bad guys all day, every day, and they’re supposed to decide when criminals are sufficiently rehabilitated to return to society. But a study released in January found that when psychopaths in Canada’s prisons were up for parole, they were 2.5 times more likely to win conditional release than non-psychopaths.

The study was conducted by Dr. Stephen Porter from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and published in the Journal of Legal and Criminological Psychology. It looked at 310 men who spent at least two years in a Canadian prison between 1995 and 1997. Most had committed violent crimes.

Ninety of the men were classified as psychopaths. They had committed significantly more offenses than the non-psychopaths. The psychopathic child abusers among them had far more charges and convictions than non-psychopathic offenders.

Vincent J. Fumo, for 30 years one of the most powerful politicians in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, has been on trial since October for conspiracy, fraud, tax offenses and obstruction of justice. Yesterday he was found guilty of all 137 counts against him. He faces 10 years or more in prison.

His co-defendant, Ruth Amano, was found guilty of all 45 counts against her.

I’ve been following this case closely, and wrote about it in November—see Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent J. Fumo on trial for corruption. He was brazen in flaunting his power, snubbing the rules, and spending “other people’s money.” He thought of himself as “royalty.”

The guy is clearly a sociopath, although no one except Lovefraud has said it. So to see a big, black headline on the front page of the newspaper this morning stating that he’d been convicted was extremely satisfying. For extensive coverage of the verdict, and a summary of the case, see Fumo: Guilty on all counts in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lovefraud recently received a letter from a 17-year-old high school student–we’ll call him Brandon. He wrote that another boy at school was using manipulation to bully him.

When Brandon resisted, the bully asked what he had done wrong, and why Brandon was being so mean—I can almost hear the false concern and sincerity dripping from his voice. The bully told Brandon to apologize.

What happened next was classic sociopathic behavior. Here’s what Brandon wrote:

When I moved away from him, he came and found me and was aggressive and wouldn’t leave me alone. And kept getting other people involved by asking them to ask me why I wouldn’t talk to him.

He then punched me and blamed me for punching me saying, “you made me do it.”

When I went to teachers to tell them they said that they can only talk to him not discipline him.

Editor’s Note: The Lovefraud reader who write as “Jofary” relates her experience with a sociopath in Canadian divorce court.

I first participated on this site three years ago when I learned that my daughter, then only a toddler, was being sexually molested by her father (my ex). Up until that point, I was dealing with things in the typical way. I had caught my ex cheating on me and, when our son was only three months old, he immediately moved in with his mistress, who herself had extricated herself from her fifteen year stable marriage, believing my ex to be her “best friend and soul mate.” That was extremely distasteful in and of itself but, given my ex’s contributions (or lack thereof) emotionally, physically, and financially to our brief marriage, I was able to disengage from him within a month of his departure. Unfortunately, he became aware that I was not going to be his “back-up” plan after he was done having his fun with this woman, and became extremely vindictive towards me. Perhaps it was my demeanour towards him – he was completely irrelevant to me and I treated him as such by refusing to answer his phone calls or greet him personally at the door during the exchange of our children. In any case, it propelled me on a path to utter chaos and unsettlement.